


Lies About Sea Creatures

by indelicates



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, HJDSJFHASKDJFJKDJJKLO;KJJ, M/M, Tenderness, Them idk!!!!!, oh the tenderness, porn without plot but also without porn, this has almost no point to it, words and things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 11:36:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20081548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indelicates/pseuds/indelicates
Summary: A centuries-old book exchanges hands, and if you let your eyes linger on the air in between just seconds too long, you can see it there, the nothingness, an absence of even the smallest mangled and burned-edged scrap of paper. And of a millenia-old love exchanging hands on a park bench. Look closely now, you’re playing with fire.





	Lies About Sea Creatures

**Author's Note:**

> this like started off as being inspired by [this](https://tio-trile.tumblr.com/post/185831806969/what-if-aziraphale-and-crowley-really-are-immune) and became??? something?? mostly bc it took me a month, yes a month to write 2200 words and also i don't know how to say normal things like a normal person. anyway i can't look at this for one more second. you're welcome.

_ “Sometimes, you just want something so hard you have to lie about it, so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute, how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once told me gannets, those voracious sea birds of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie. Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die.” _

_ -Ada Limón, “Lies About Sea Creatures” _

\---

There’s really no need to put this into words. Theirs is the same as the story of the Earth. Let that sink in.

Still. To take it back to the start, in the beginning, in the garden, there was a...well _ he _ was a, um, wily old snake and-

Shh shh shh. No, just a little further back.

“You’re the man in the car, you stole my book.” 

“Oh, Book Girl! Catch.”

A centuries-old book exchanges hands, and if you let your eyes linger on the air in between just seconds too long, you can see it there, the nothingness, an absence of even the smallest mangled and burned-edged scrap of paper. And of a millenia-old love exchanging hands on a park bench. Look closely now, you’re playing with fire.

\---

It’s a nice day, despite rain having been invented some time ago, when a man in a straw hat hands a vanilla with a flake to a figure all in black and a strawberry lolly to one in shades of white. Everything back just the way it was.

“You heard from your people yet?”

Aziraphale shakes his head. “Yours?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you understand what...happened yesterday?”

“Well, I understand some of it,” Crowley says knowingly. “But some of it, well, it’s just a little bit too-”

That’s meant to be bad luck.

And then it all happens so fast.

\---

“What appears to be the problem?” Aziraphale asks. Gabriel ignores the question.

“Now, have we heard from our new associate?”

An answer: he’s on his way.

“He’s on his way! I think you’re going to like this. I really do. And I bet you didn’t see this one coming.”

\---

Down below it’s a second verse, same as the first. Little bit darker and a little bit worse.

The trial of the demon Crowley. Beginning with evidence and ending with utter obliviation is in session.

And had he? Seen this coming? Well. 

\---

Let’s take it just a little further back this time.

To the dolphins. To the whales. They raise another glass to all creatures, great and small. They pour one out for the bouillabaisseification of it all.

They reach an agreement. Save the whales. We’ll be godfathers. But that isn’t what this is about.

They’re working together now. By way of working against each other. Just like old times. If nothing else, it will be these final eleven years spent side by side with the one that you-

Sometimes, you just want something so hard you have to lie about it.

\---

“-and the murderer of a fellow demon. A crime I saw with my own eyes.” That isn’t what this is about either, but it’s what they’re deciding to call it. Finally after all these years he’s given them an excuse. Not that demons need one.

Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Letting the punishment fit the crime.

And it does. After all, he hadn’t gone on about that business with the holy water for a _ century _ because he wanted something as un-assuring as insurance. It was, before anything else, just another excuse to spend time with the person who-

He can admit that to himself in these last minutes of his life.

\---

A little further back this time. In the beginning , in the garden, there was a...well _ he _ was a, um, wily old snake and Aziraphale was a beacon at the start of something new. It’s the same story as the story of the Earth.

Crowley glides up the side of the wall and into the light of Aziraphale’s shadow. And is this where it begins? It’s quite a view from up here. You can see it all. If you know where to look. Out and out to the future where it ends, as it will start, in a garden. To the apocalypse which looks infinitesimal from so great a height. To a millenia-old love exchanging glances on a park bench. To the world.

\---

Well of _ course _ love was invented by a demon. Love as we know it between humans on planet Earth, at least. What, you thought millions of flowers torn to pieces in the name of “he loves me he loves me not”, the missed connections section of Craigslist, and Don't They Know It's The End Of the World It Ended When You Said Goodbye were heaven’s doing? Thing is, none of that so much as crossed his mind that day, early on, when he’d come up with the idea. All he’d wanted was to put a word to the way he felt when he thought about the light in Aziraphale’s eyes.. It had all been just a little bit too-

The higher ups down below’d loved that one. Especially how quickly things escalated. First loves and last loves and ones in-between, and befores and afters and two at a time, three at a time. Hey-I-just-met-you-and-this-is-crazies and decade long slow-burns, all collaged messily upon a human lifespan.

And Crowley? Well. Some 5,971 but whos counting years later he-

(You told me what you think, 105 years ago)

-summons, one unforeseen night, every last petal of both the celestial love from which he had originally been made and that which he’d inadvertently plagued humanity with for 5,971 years minus one day, all the flower gardens planted in the name of perfect proposals, the love letters still being sent despite the invention of the telephone, and God Only Knows What I’d Be Without You. He summons this love and asks Aziraphale if he will, just this once, let Crowley drop him somewhere, anywhere he wants to go.

Oh, don’t look so disappointed.

\---

When Aziraphale shuts his stupid mouth and dies already, it’s nothing like he’d imagined it would be. But then, what had, in his life, gone according to plan? To his plan or to Her’s. The giving away of his sword when the Earth was new. The slow giving away of a part of himself that started just moments later. Against all odds, he’d fallen, just a little bit, from heaven after all. And into Earth’s warm embrace. Or at least that of the person he’d known longer than he’d known the feeling of rain.

He closes his eyes and thinks of him.

Against all odds he doesn’t die. The fire feels a lot more like nothingness than watching a car drive away on an every-colored street one unforeseen night. Later, he’ll come out of it only mostly intact. A slight temperature here, a sunburned kind of feeling there. But for now, the only pain he knows is the uncertainty over whether it’s Crowley too or-

That he might have to face what’s left of eternity alone.

“It may be worse than we thought,” chorus the angels.

From down below comes, “He’s gone native. He isn’t one us anymore.”

All together now: “What is he?”

\---

To the third alternative rendezvous. To a crowded street corner in Soho. We’re running out of time now. A love as old as the Earth itself minus a week or so, and both might have just hours left. 

To the great blasted plan.

“May you be forgiven,” Aziraphale says.

“I won’t be forgiven. Not ever. Part of a demon’s job description. Unforgivable, that’s what I am.” But he was an angel, once.

(Would I lie to you? Obviously, you’re a demon, that’s what you do.)

“I forgive you,” Aziraphale says, almost pleads. _ Crowley, please. Please know that you are so many more things than that. Wily and cunning and brilliant and- _

And besides, Aziraphale likes what Crowley is, what he's always been. But he gives him permission to choose to be. To not-to-be. And a little bit more of hell burns away.

\---

He feels his knees nearly give out from under him at the sight of Crowley riding the escalator up while he himself makes his way down. Crowley, he’s dripping wet head to toe and is inhumanly, indemonly pale and looks on the verge of collapse himself, but he's in one piece and he's doing that thing where his eyes behind his sunglasses light up so much that it shows on his entire face and shines right through his skin. It's an emotion that hasn’t yet been named, this lighting up of Crowley's eyes. It’s too bad, Aziraphale thinks, that the word “love” is already taken.

Aziraphale closes the distance between them with wishful thinking alone, some kind of miracle that he doesn't remember doing. And there it is, Crowley is collapsing in his arms with his last bit of strength but mostly with a sigh of sixty centuries of building up to this moment. _ Loved by me, that's what you are, _ Aziraphale says inside his head, as cries of "What is he, what _ is _ he _ ?" _ ring throughout heaven and hell. _ You are now, and you always were. We did it. _

_ \--- _

It's nothing worth writing songs about. There's really no need to put this into words. Sure, they managed to save the world by nothing more and nothing less than loving each other enough to call that a reason to lend a hand to all creatures great and small in the process. And this love, yes it literally saved them both from total destruction or whatever. But save all your romanticisms for another story. This is the same as the story of the earth. And the earth, after 6,000 years of loving and being loved by the people who inhabited it, became something new, something not of heaven or of hell, but something all it’s own.

They support each other all the way back to Crowley's flat, like the many "You’re an angel I don’t think you can do the wrong thing"s and “I can’t have you risking your life"s of years gone by. Once there, Aziraphale pulls off Crowley’s wet outer layers and presses him gently into bed. He thinks about a very near future, a day or two’s time away at most, where they do this all again. The tugging off of Crowley’s clothing, the pressing of him into the mattress, not _ quite _ so gently this time. 

But for now: “Hate to break it to you, Angel, but I don’t know how fitting a name that is for you anymore. Maybe it never was.” Crowley nearly whispers this from where his head rests on a pillow. Aziraphale sits down on the edge of the bed.

“Should I start calling you that now?” he asks with a hint of a laugh. But he knows it isn’t anything so much as that. Not a tilting of the scales in quite that direction. Maybe a destruction of the scales all together. 

Crowley smiles softly.

“I always liked it when, well,” he starts, and for a moment Aziraphale thinks he is going to leave it hanging like that. But then something passes over Crowley’s face. A realization, maybe, that they are so far beyond the golden age of all of that nonsense, the holding back of a part of themselves from one another. He begins again. “I always kinda liked it when you’d call me, well, _ dear _.” he says carefully. Then adds a “shutup” for good measure before Aziraphale can even say anything.,

Aziraphale looks him in his still-demonic eyes. And, with all the love in the world, the love that was put there in the first place by the two of them looking each other in the eyes, puts a hand on Crowley’s cheek, pushes his slowly drying hair back a little from his forehead, and says, “Oh my dear. Oh, my _ love. _ ” To the world. To the _ world._

\---

They live to see the end of it, that total melting down of the earth as we know it. This time brought on by humanity, warring for reasons unknown against their only home. Aziraphale and Crowley sit this one out and are off among the stars before the end of things. The humans, they never quite manage to repair the irreparable. But things go on, they live past that, following not far behind on a tour through outer space. They bring with them curiosity and disobedience and yes, a bit of a penchant for self-destruction. But humanity lives on in the love they pass down from one to another. First loves and last loves and ones in-between, and befores and afters and decade-long slow burns, all collaged messily upon the span of human history. It started with the giving away of a sword and with the light in Aziraphale’s eyes. 

Crowley and Aziraphale mourn the loss of sushi and of fascinating little restaurants where they know you. But they’d’ve outlived that one way or another. And it’s not so bad, to exist with the knowledge that you will live to see the stars burn out, when something older than the stars, something that’d put them there in the first place, goes on and on and on not so much by your side but within the very heart of you. That’s how it’s been since before the feeling of rain and that’s how it always will. Be.


End file.
